Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/03/28/chinese-jaywalkers-are-identif.html
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Christ, Marx, Wood, and Wei led us to this perfect day.
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USA: So we’ve got a crazed know-nothing autocrat for president, white supremacy is on the rise, giant corporations are sharing surveillance data with sinister right-wing manipulators, robot vehicles are mowing down pedestrians, and our tele-operated killing machines are striking indiscriminately across the globe. I think we’ve really got a head start on this whole dystopian future thing, you know?
CHINA: Hold my Tsingtao pale lager …
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Yay! False positives!
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I wish I knew how to paste links on my phone. The Wikipedia article on jaywalking puts this in a whole new light.
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Long press, a menu will pop up.
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Too hard, I’m over 50.
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lol
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That was my first thought - and I’m sure there will be no recourse as to correcting the record, either. Probably like the “social credit” score.
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Even when they’re pushing bicycles?
You are fined one credit for a violation of the Verbal Morality Statute.
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Anyone want to program one of these hats to Xi Jinping?
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TFW you realize you’re in the worse kind of cyberpunk dystopia.
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Not the very worst; books still exist and are still readily available to the masses, and there are people still walking around without microchip implants.
*waits for some smart aleck to tell me “Give it time.”
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I visit Shenzhen quite a bit. I look forward to seeing myself on that site.
…Until it’s the immigration officer at passport control telling me they can’t let me into the country because I have no respect for walk signs.
Ugh, Shenzhen is already a terrible place to walk (or bicycle) in. See the slip turn lane in the header photo, with the crosswalk across it? That lane has no stop nor yield sign, meaning cars can turn right without slowing down during any phase of the light and pedestrians (and cyclists, who are forced to use the sidewalks) are forced to yield. I’m not sure if crosswalks technically give pedestrians right-of-way or not (as they do in most countries), but in practice, cars do not yield.
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In my province, crosswalks do give pedestrians the right-of-way and the drivers respect this… because the police recently started cracking down on drivers hitting people in crosswalks.
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That is good to hear. The other cities I have visited in China (Shanghai and Nanjing), I found to be much more pleasant places to walk (and cycle). I suspect that Shenzhen is worse because it was largely planned during the 1980s, on the tail end of the mid-20th-century cars-first craze which ruined (IMO) so many American cities.
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For even more (USA-centric) context: Fighting Traffic.
At the time the phrase was coined, “Jay” was a moderately insulting pejorative, and the laws against “jay-walking” were pushed through by auto-industry-backed “safety” groups as part of a campaign to transform city streets from common spaces shared by all into dedicated space for cars to speed, which set the U.S. on the path to today’s entirely motor-centric infrastructure.
Ironically, “jay” originally meant a country person unused to city streets, whereas in a major city today you can tell who’s not a city person because they’re the ones religiously observing the crossing lights.
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